Waterbury Democrat

The Bootblack's Story.

When a dozen newsboys and bootblacks had collected on the Custom House stairs, recently, and when each one had grown tired of jaw-breakers and popcorn balls, "Little English" remarked:

'Sposen Jim Cocoanut tells us a story."

"Sposen!" remarked all the boys.

"Well, gentlemen," remarked Jim, after a few digs at his head, "I will tell you a true story about a girl. Her name was Marier, and she had yaller hair, blue eyes, small feet, and she was worth a million dollars."

"In stamps?" asked Cross Eyed Dick.

"In clean cash, right in the savings bank," answered Jim. "This girl was an orphan, with no one to boss her around, and if she wanted to be out till eleven o'clock at night, she could. There were piles of fellows after her to marry her, but she stuck up her nose at the hull caboodle."

"What fur?" anxiously inquired Firecracker Tom.

"What fur? Why, she knew they loved her money instead of herself. She wanted some one to love her earnestly like gosh. Well, one day when she was going down to the Post Office to see if there was any mail, a runaway horse came along. Maria fainted away and sat down in the road, and she'd have been broken all to pieces if it hadn't been for a bootblack about my size. He pulled her into a shooting gallery, brought her to, and then hired a hull omnibus and took her home."

"And they fell in love and were finally married," remarked Suspender Johnson.

"No, my fellow countrymen," sadly replied Jim; "gin him ten cents!"

"And is that all?" exclaimed three or four voices.

"All she gave him, and that turned out to be a counterfeit!"

There was a long period of silence, and then Cocoanut Jim continued:

"Which is a lesson to us never to marry a girl worth a million dollars."

"And we never shall!" they solemnly replied.—Detroit Press.